"In my days of flaming youth I was extremely suspect of any rock music played by white people. The sincerity and emotional intensity of their performances, when they sang about boyfriends and girl friends and breaking up, etc., was nowhere when I compared it to my high school Negro R&B heroes like Johnny Otis, Howlin' Wolf and Willie Mae Thornton.
But then I remember going to see Blackboard Jungle. When the titles flashed up there on the screen Bill Haley and his Comets started blurching "One Two Three O'Clock, Four O'Clock Rock...." It was the loudest sound kids had ever heard at that time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players listening to the "dirty music" of their life style. ("Go in yout room if you wanna listen to that crap... and turn the volume all the way down.") But in the theatre, watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn't tell you to turn it down. I didn't care if Bill Haley was white or sincere... he was playing the Ten-Age National Anthem and it was so LOUD I was jumping up and down. Blackboard Jungle, not even considering the story line (which had the old people winning in the end) represented a strange sort of "endorsement" of the ten-age cause: "They have made a movie about us, therefore, we exist..."
From the very beginning, the real reason Mr. & Mrs. Clean White America objected to this music was the fact that it was performed by black people. There was always the danger that one night--maybe in the middle of the summer, in a little pink party dress--Janey or Susy might be overwhelmed by the lewd, pulsating jungle rhythms and do something to make their parents ashamed." Frank Zappa
Louis Armstrong (14.4 | 28.8) GUESTS: CLARK TERRY, Jazz musician and bandleader, plays trumpet and flugelhorn. DAN MORGENSTERN, Director of the Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University and LAURENCE BERGREEN, author,Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (Broadway Books, 1997). "Louis Armstrong has been called the greatest musician of the century. While some may disagree, one thing is certain: after Louis, no one played or sang popular music the same way. Miles Davis once said that you can't play anything on the trumpet that Louis hadn't played-- even modern music. And while Armstrong may not have been gifted with a classically beautiful singing voice, the way he made a melody his own has inspired popular singers ever since; Frank Sinatra said that Louis Armstrong turned popular song into art. July 4th is the day when Armstrong's birthday is traditionally celebrated, so across the country this Independence Day, Americans will also be celebrating a hundred years of Pops. Join Juan Williams and guests for a look at the life and influence of Louis Armstrong, on the next Talk of the Nation, from NPR News." Talk of the Nation February 11, 1998.